Monthly Archives: August 2014

It’s important to reflect…

I found myself talking to a colleague yesterday, who knew nothing about my non-work life or the project Richard and I are now struggling to stay positive about…

As I answered her questions (about our build) and described all the things we have done so far, all the achievements, triumphs we have reached, and all the hopes and ambitions we started out with, I started to feel reconnected to The Dream. I felt my heart quicken, my speech become more animated, and I’m pretty sure my eyes started to brighten.

When you are just so far into the build, and it has taken way too long to even get that far, that all you can see is how much more you have to do, it is really important to show and tell to someone who doesn’t know you. This provides two things: really positive feedback, incredulity at how enormous and amazing what you are doing is; and a reconnection to your project that rekindles your passion.

Thank you Lorna, for your encouragement and genuine enthusiasm for what Richard and I are doing.

Why the name?

Welcome to our Wild Corner blog ‘One handful at a time’…

Why have we chosen this name? Well, it’s kind of like ‘how do you eat an elephant’; only it’s handfuls (of mud and cob) not mouthfuls.

When Richard and I decided to build the dream home, neither of us imagined what it would take. Not the money side of things, you can budget and seek quotes, and guesstimate that. But the personal investment. Neither of us could possibly have ‘guesstimated’ how much energy and resilience we would need to get through this.

The decision making is overwhelming. The planning is exhausting. The visualising is challenging at best and impossible at worst.

So, to stay sane, and keep ourselves going as we head on into what seems an interminable journey, we focus on just the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing…

And when you are talking about a straw bale house, that means we are literally building one handful at a time.

We’ll try to update with regular blogs so that you can come on our journey. But please forgive us if it is a long time between posts. It’s probably because the weather is fine and we are out on site, building, building, building…

 

The all-new (improved?) Wild Corner

We have moved! From our old (embarrassingly old) ‘FrontPage’ website, to a new and hopefully improved WordPress site. Bear with us as we find our way around WordPress… Yes, it looks pretty much like the old site, I just transferred all the pages across because that’s just about all I know how to do with Word Press so far! But hopefully we’ll get a bit more adventurous and at least, with any luck, using WordPress will mean more regular updates to our website.